My wife and I started gardening in Fukuoka (Japan) in 2003. There was nothing but muddy clayey sloping land. At the beginning we made several structure such as steps and paths, and planted turf, fruit trees, roses, herbs etc.
In 2010, we visited several famous English gardens, including Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Mottisfont Abbey Garden and Hidcote Manor Garden. We were shocked by the glory of those gardens. Since then, we have been trying to make small but glorious gardens by ourselves.
The yellow tree peony High Noon has started to bloom in the peony and peony beds. The flowers are wonderfully gorgeous and have a distinct strong fragrance. The best time to see them is in a few days, but they have a captivating presence.
Next to them you can see the buds of the herbaceous peonies, which will soon be in bloom.
This is a flowering hyacinth orchid that grows in the shade of the central flower bed. It is an easy-to-grow type of orchid and has a beautiful purple colour, along with its wonderful foliage.
There is a fence of Jasminum polyanthum behind a small fountain directly at the upper entrance to the garden. The beautiful flowers bloom every year at the end of April, releasing a wonderful fragrance
The carpenter bees are actively coming to the flowers to suck the nectar, but close observation shows that the distance from the top of the flower to the nectar base is great, so the bees go to the bottom of the flower to suck the nectar directly from the base of the flower. The video below shows this clearly.
This jasmine has also been trained to grow on the arch a little way up from the entrance at the bottom of the garden. It has been very vigorous this year and is producing lots of flowers.
Fruit trees have been flowering in our gardens since March, and now the apple blossoms are finally in bloom.
The apple in the main garden is the crab apple, which is a beautiful pink colour. The apples start off dark pink and gradually fade to a lighter colour, with small, inedible berries of just over 1 cm in diameter.
Two varieties of edible apples (Alpine Maiden and Fuji) are grown in the Potager, one in an arch and both in espalier, both of which have white flowers. There seem to be fewer flowers this year, perhaps because of last year's bumper crop.
Asparagus is a perennial vegetable, which grows many shoots each spring which are then harvested. Some of the shoots are left to grow to allow it to develop, so that it can be harvested every year. Spring is the main time for harvesting, but some can also be harvested in summer and autumn. At the end of autumn, the above-ground parts die and are all cut back.
The asparagus grown in our potager is the purple variety. The beautiful colour is lost when boiled.
Echium candicans is a perennial plant native to the Madeira Islands (Eastern Atlantic, off the coast of Morocco), a very wonderful plant with large, dense spikes of beautiful blue-purple flowers that attract many flower bees. It is known as the pride of Madeira. The Latin specific epithet candicans means "shining white", and the name comes from the colour of the leaves of this plant.
It is not very common in Japan yet, but I was interested in its wonderful appearance and started growing seedlings, which often died after two years of flowering, and I was puzzled at first because the seeds were hard to find, but often many germinated from spilt seeds, which I potted up and grew into seedlings, I have been enjoying the flowers every year for a long time.
The plant that produced so many flower spikes this year grew from a spill next to the entrance to the garden, and some of the branches and leaves were cut off because they were in the way of traffic. Bees and bumblebees are immediately coming to the flowers and sucking the nectar. The next few weeks will be the best time to see the flowers.